You may have a world class ecommerce store, complete with great products and a seamless user experience, but this alone will not lead to success in and of itself. With all the time and effort expended in the development process, now is not the time to sit back and hope for the best.

One of the most proven methods of driving conversions for your ecommerce store is email marketing, a process that lets you nurture subscribers from first-time contacts to loyal buyers and brand ambassadors. In fact, email marketing provides an estimated $40 for every $1 return on investment – the highest of all digital marketing strategies.

How, you may be asking, does one even begin the process from scratch without an existing contact list? Well, you’re in luck. Below, we outline 6 tried and true strategies to grow your email list, and eventually your business.

1. Decide on an ecommerce email marketing platform

Do some research. There are endless ecommerce email marketing providers out there that simplify and even automate the email marketing process. With so many options, make sure to choose one that is tailored to the needs of your business.

Email marketing platforms provide a number of benefits, including:

Your choice of pre-made signup form templates

List segmentation based on behavior

Multiple email lists

Email automation

2. Use the standard opt-In form

You’ve no doubt seen the standard opt-in forms used across the ecommerce world, especially if you have visited any Shopify site, where it comes pre-enabled. On Woocommerce, you will have to add this when designing the website. Unless you have another sign-up form enabled (see ‘pop-ups’ below), don’t neglect to have this feature enabled.

3. Utilize Pop-ups

The standard opt-in form is useful, yet passive. It relies on the user finding, and then deciding to fill it in while browsing your page. A better, more dynamic option is to utilize a pop-op style opt in.

These can be programmed to show after a certain amount of time, or when the user engages in particular behaviors (such as percentage of page scrolled, or when choosing to leave the site). Test these options for the highest response rates.

4. Incentivize!

Users often (veering towards ‘always’) need a bit of a push in order to sign up for your newsletter. Why should they sign up if you don’t provide something of value to them? Determine what your customers value, and test it. Incentives can take many forms, with discounts and free shipping being among the most popular. Below are just a couple more that you may want to employ.

Lead Magnet – A lead magnet is any valuable resource your customers may want. This may take the form of an informative ebook, pdf guide, or stock images, for example. In order to access the resource, the user needs to register for your newsletter and email campaign.

Give-away – A give-away can have tons of potential. As all lotteries demonstrate, people are extremely attracted to the potential of a huge payout for little investment, no matter how minute their chance of winning. Make sure your prize is aimed at your target audience to avoid low-value sign-ups.

Referral Program – Use an incentive to grow your list organically by using your existing subscribers. Offer something for users to share your sign ups with friends and family.

5. Make it fun – Gamify

Once rare and considered outside-the-box, interactive sign-up forms have become more and more popular, and with good reason. People are attracted to these mini-games as ways to test their luck for some chance at winning a prize.

A popular type is a wheel-of-fortune type game where the user gets a free spin as a reward for signing up. Many ecommerce email marketing platforms will include a number of these gamified pop-ups as standard options.

6. Create custom landing pages

When running any marketing campaign, it is often best to make sure that the first thing that the potential customer sees is directly related to the ad that they’ve attracted their attention in the first place. Landing on the homepage can result in high bounce rate, as users can get lost or do not have the time or motivation to explore further. This results in a high bounce rate.

Craft landing pages that reflect the information or offer presented in the ads. This should result in significantly higher signups, and ultimately sales.

Conclusion

There are always improvements to be made in the world of ecommerce, and creating a robust emailing list is one of the most important. By utilizing one or more of the aforementioned strategies, you’ll be ready to begin a world-class email campaign in no time.